


Reconstruction

by conceptofzero



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-28
Updated: 2012-04-28
Packaged: 2017-11-04 11:12:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,161
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/393179
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/conceptofzero/pseuds/conceptofzero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first month after he wakes up on the meteor, WV spends most of his time alone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Reconstruction

**Author's Note:**

> Happy birthday Shad!

The first month after he wakes up, WV spends most of his time alone. There’s a scar in his stomach where Jack Noir ripped him open, and a hole in his memory between passing out from blood loss and waking up, surrounded by players. No one knows what happened to everyone else. They say WV just appeared out of nowhere, came tumbling down onto the meteor like a sack of potatoes. No one else showed up after him.

Which means everyone else is dead. WV was there on the Battlefield, he knows what Jack Noir is capable of, and he knows from the dull explosions from outside the thick walls of the terminal that WV’s was not the first place Jack Noir stopped. The ring is missing from his wrappings, and he’s not sure if that’s a good sign or a bad one.

There are plenty of places to hide, and he hides there, ignoring the children who try to seek him out now and then. He wants to be alone again. Nobody dies because of him when he’s alone.

Most of them stop looking for WV after a while. Only the one boy and girl keep coming around. WV recognizes the boy after a while as the one who wrote the red text, who was quite rude and not worth speaking with. He says inane things, talking to a nearly empty room while WV sits in the corners of too-tall staircases and mourns the loss of Can Town and all that will never be. He says his name is Dave, a single syllable without any meaning. He asks WV questions sometimes, but never seems to mind that he doesn’t get an answer. Mostly he talks about things that WV can only half-follow at first, but only intensifies his depression as the reality sets in.

Derse and Prospit are gone. The universe reset. They’re travelling to a new Session, a world where everything is brand new. A world where Jack Noir didn’t come to pass. A world full of new versions of everyone WV knows, even himself.

In the first month, he doesn’t eat. The old familiar hunger pains return quickly enough and WV pays them no mind. They’re like friends by now, the only friends WV has. They try to give him food, but he doesn’t want any of it. It all smells awful and looks worse. He’d rather not eat anyway. Eating will just remind him of that last doomed meal, of a fire and friends that he had for a few short hours.

It’s the girl who gets him to eat. She’s a player too, WV knows just by looking at her, though she’s not the same species as the boy Dave. Her name is Terezi, and she sniffs WV, laughing maniacally and telling him how much he smells like blackberries, much nicer than the black licorice she smelled on a certain other Dersite she doesn’t call by name. She brings her dinner with her when she comes to see him, sitting beside WV and eating, talking and talking and talking. Like with Dave, it doesn’t matter if WV answers back, she just talks all the same.

One day, she sets her food down, and there on the tray are thick green stems of some sort of vegetable. WV’s mouth waters, his flat teeth pressing tight together. He hasn’t eaten in so long, and they look so good...

“Do you like green?” She asks WV, catching him off guard. The girl picks up one of the stems, pressing it up against her nose and sniffing it deeply, and then sniffing in his direction, a grin sliding across her face as if she knows something he doesn’t. She takes a bite of it, her sharp teeth snapping it easily in half. WV watches her chew it, his eyes darting back over to the tray. They’re like tiny trees, the ends so dark and so green...

“Yo Terezi, where you at? I found another of those secret puzzle rooms.” Dave comes down the stairs, his hood pushed back and his hair sticking up. He spots them near the end and hops off the edge, floating down to meet them. “How’s the mayor? You manage to cram anything into his gullet?”

WV burps, aware that there are no more stalks left on the tray, and he’s got little bits of it on his wrappings. Terezi gives WV a sharp grin, slinging one bony arm around his shoulder. Normally he would shrink away from the contact, but all he can focus on is the leafy taste lingering in his mouth. “He’s got a green tooth! Green is a very tasty colour you know! Not as decadent as red, but it is very crisp and fresh.”

“Oh good, you two can bond over being fucking crazy.” Dave takes a seat in front of them, and the two children just talk and talk while WV feels his stomach slowly stop growling.

They bring him more of the green things - Dave calls them weird-mutant-broccoli, Terezi calls them greenflowers - and they talk to him every day. Dave’s the one who starts calling him Mayor, and who tries to convince him to sleep upstairs with the rest of them. He thinks about telling them why he can’t leave here, why he doesn’t want beds or to be so close to others again, and the words just get stuck in his throat so he says nothing at all. He can’t even tell Dave not to call him a mayor. He’s not a mayor. He’s mayor of nothing. Mayor of endless failures.

He doesn’t sleep upstairs, but he does agree to go with them on their quests through the laboratories. WV was only ever in a place like this once, but once was enough for him to learn things. In a hoarse and shaking voice, he slowly explains the few things they can’t figure out on their own. He shows them how the empty cloning tubes once worked, how imprints could be chosen and tweaked. WV explains the reason behind the puzzles, and watches as Dave and Terezi solve them with ease.

It’s during their exploration that they find the hidden cans. WV goes very still when he sees them, looking at the piles and piles of them. Dave and Terezi don’t notice at first, reading labels and making jokes to each other about them (they have both attempted to explain the jokes but WV doesn’t quite understand why they’re funny. He doubts he ever will, but he still likes to hear them joking). WV looks at them, and for a moment. he remembers how Can Town looked when he and AR were finished with it. It had been a serious business, arranging the buildings and the military. AR had kept fiddling with the Courthouse right up until the end, but WV had still been most proud of the Town Hall, and the way Serenity’s light gave it all such a warm and welcoming glow.

He looks down at the sash on his chest and he can’t stand to wear it any longer. WV yanks it over his head, throwing it down on the floor and heads out the door, ignoring the confused questions from Dave and Terezi. He can’t explain any of this to them, or to anyone else alive. The only people who would have understood are dead.

There are plenty of places to hide, and WV finds a good one among a broken terminal. They won’t find him here. He pulls his knees up to his chest and he closes his eyes, wanting to die and for this all to be over. The others are all dead, and his city will never exist anywhere outside of his memories. The little of flame of hope he’s carried inside of him through the desert dims and he waits for it to be snuffed out.

“Did I tell you I’m a deputy?” Dave surprises WV. He’s sitting outside the terminal, but WV didn’t hear him come in. He’s got his broken sword sitting across his lap, and he’s looking up at the ceiling. “So I’m minding my own business, just chilling out on the ground beside the body of my dead brother and I don’t feel like ever getting back up because fuck that noise. And then there’s this voice in my head telling me that I got to bring some furry asshole to justice, and that I was being deputized so I could throw him in the slammer. First and last time I heard anybody talk to me. Rose says she had the same thing happen once, though she didn’t become a deputy of shit so mine was better than hers by a mile.”

He turns the sword in his lap so the jagged edge faces away from WV. “I could have laid there forever. Not like there was anything worth getting up for. Bro was gone, John had shit under control, and I had all the time in the world. Could have just pressed pause on the world and never got back up. Except I couldn’t, because there was this crazy chick with a hardon for the colour red who wouldn’t leave me alone, and this voice deputizing my ass. I didn’t much appreciate them at the time, but they got me moving when I didn’t want to.”

Dave says nothing for a little while, taking his glasses off to wipe them down. WV’s a bit surprised to see his face without them. He looks very young with the glasses off, and his eyes look very sad. A moment later, he pops them back on and they disappear, his face returning to that stoic look that WV is used to.

“What I’m saying is that you can’t quit because I can’t be a deputy of nowhere if there’s no mayor to give me orders.” He extends the Mayor sash to WV. WV stares at it for a while, still wanting to just stay curled up inside the broken machine until his body gives out. How many times does one person have to keep trying until you can stop it?

It’s a silly question to ask. He already knows the answer. WV reaches out, taking the sash. You try until your body stops, not until your heart wants to quit. He squeezes out through the broken machine and puts the sash back on, looking up at Dave.

Dave makes his sword disappear, getting to his feet. “So, Mayor, what do we do now?”

There’s only one thing to do. “We rebuild Can Town.” He says, his voice still raw and quiet. Dave just nods, like that’s the most sensible thing he’s heard. And maybe it is.

Terezi is still in the room with the cans. She looks worried, right up until she smells the sash around WV’s middle and then she’s grinning ear to ear again. “There’s that succulent red R! Are you ready to explore again?”

“Fuck exploring, we got a better idea. Mr Mayor here says we should build a can town and just look at all these tin cylinders just waiting to be turned into city halls and peep shows.” Dave starts gathering up stacks of cans in his arms.

“Ahahahahaha! A can town! What a wonderful idea Mr. Mayor!” Terezi picks up a few cans in her hands, her already wide smile just getting wider as she’s fitting them into her inventory. “And of course, you’ll be needing some sort of judicial branch, something modelled after the proud and ruthless legislacerators!”

“He’s got one already. You’re looking at the one and only official deputy of Can Town. Eat it.” Dave crams the armful of cans into his inventory and pretends to shine a badge on his chest. Terezi gasps loudly, hands snapping up to cover her mouth, and the two of them fall into their usual habits of friendly bickering.

WV just picks up a tin and holds it in his hands, feeling his heart hurt slightly, but knowing that this is the right thing to do. It hurts to try again, but that’s what you have to do; you have to try. You have to build, even though it would be easier not to.

He glances at the wrappings on his hand. The ring was missing when he woke up. Maybe Jack took it... but maybe he didn’t. Maybe right now, there’s someone else out there wearing the ring, maybe AR, maybe PM, and they’re chasing after Jack. It’s unlikely, but it can’t hurt to have hope. Hope to rebuild. Hope to see his friends again, someday, or somewhere. And if not... then to remember them the way they’d like to be remembered.

This time, he’s going to include a monument for the ones who were lost, and a post office, and a library, and a police station. And he’s going to be the mayor he knows they would want him to be.


End file.
